LiDAR
LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) is a remote sensing technology that measures distances by emitting laser pulses and recording their return time — producing dense, accurate 3D point clouds of the surrounding environment.
LiDAR sensors emit thousands to millions of laser pulses per second, measuring the time-of-flight for each pulse to calculate precise distances. The result is a 3D point cloud with centimetre- or millimetre-level accuracy, depending on the sensor grade and range.
Sensor types include spinning mechanical LiDAR (Velodyne, Ouster), solid-state LiDAR (Livox), flash LiDAR, and time-of-flight cameras (Intel RealSense, Azure Kinect). Each trades off range, density, field of view, and cost differently. Mobile LiDAR on smartphones (iPhone Pro, iPad Pro) has made casual 3D scanning accessible.
In AI pipelines, LiDAR point clouds are processed by specialised 3D deep learning architectures for tasks like semantic segmentation (labelling ground, walls, objects), object detection, and SLAM (simultaneous localisation and mapping). Fusion with camera imagery combines LiDAR's geometric accuracy with visual appearance information.
Datameister processes LiDAR data across industrial inspection, construction, and robotics — building pipelines that go from raw scans to segmented, analysed, and actionable 3D representations.